Art and Socialism

By William Morris
My friends, I want you to look into the relations of Art to

Commerce, using the latter word to express what is

generally meant by it; namely, that system of competition in

the market which is indeed the only form which most people

now-a-days suppose that Commerce can take.

Now whereas there have been times in the world's history

when Art held the supremacy over Commerce; when Art

was a good deal, and Commerce, as we understand the

word, was a very little; so now on the contrary it will be

admitted by all, I fancy, that Commerce has become of very

great importance and Art of very little.

I say this will be generally admitted, but different persons

will hold very different opinions not only as to whether this

is well or ill, but even as to what it really means when we

say that Commerce has become of supreme importance and

that Art has sunk into an unimportant matter.

Allow me to give you my opinion of the meaning of it; which

will lead me on to ask you to consider what remedies should

be applied for curing the evils that exist in the relations

between Art and Commerce.

Now to speak plainly it seems to me that the supremacy of

Commerce (as we understand the word) is an evil, and a

very serious one; and I should call it an unmixed evil— but

for the strange continuity of life which runs through all

historical events, and by means of which the very evils of

such and such a period tend to abolish themselves.

For to my mind it means this: that the world of modern

civilization in its haste to gain a very inequitably divided

material prosperity has entirely suppressed popular Art: or

in other words that the greater part of the people have no

share in Art—which as things now are must be kept in the

hands of a few rich or well-to-do people, who we may fairly

say need it less and not more than the laborious workers.

Nor is that all the evil, nor the worst of it; for the cause of

this famine of Art is that whilst people work throughout the

civilized world as laboriously as ever they did, they have lost

—in losing an Art which was done by and for the people—

the natural solace of that labour; a solace which they once

had, and always should have, the opportunity of expressing

their own thoughts to their fellows by means of that very

labour, by means of that daily work which nature or long

custom, a second nature, does indeed require of them, but

without meaning that it should be an unrewarded and

repulsive burden.

But, through a strange blindness an error in the civilization

of these latter days, the world's work almost all of it—the

work some share of which should have been the helpful

companion of every man—has become even such a burden,

which every man, if he could, would shake off. I have said

that people work no less laboriously than they ever did; but

I should have said that they work more laboriously.

The wonderful machines which in the hands of just and

foreseeing men would have been used to minimize repulsive

labour and to give pleasure—or in other words added life—to

the human race, have been so used on the contrary that

they have driven all men into mere frantic haste and hurry,

thereby destroying pleasure, that is life, on all hands: they

have instead of lightening the labour of the workmen,

intensified it, and thereby added more weariness yet to the

burden which the poor have to carry.

Nor can it be pleaded for the system of modern civilization

that the mere material or bodily gains of it balance the loss

of pleasure which it has brought upon the world; for as I

hinted before those gains have been so unfairly divided that

the contrast between rich and poor has been fearfully

intensified, so that in all civilized countries, but most of all in

England, the terrible spectacle is exhibited of two peoples,

living street by street, and door by door—people of the

same blood, the same tongue, and at least nominally living

under the same laws—but yet one civilized and the other

uncivilized.

All this I say is the result of the system that has trampled

down Art, and exalted Commerce into a sacred religion; and

it would seem is ready, with the ghastly stupidity which is

its principal characteristic, to mock the Roman satirist for his

noble warning by taking it in inverse meaning, and now bids

us all "for the sake of life to destroy the reasons for living."

And now in the teeth of this stupid tyranny I put forward a

claim on behalf of labour enslaved by Commerce, which I

know no thinking man can deny is reasonable, but which if

acted on would involve such a change as would defeat

Commerce; that is, would put Association instead of

Competition, Social order instead of Individualist anarchy.

Yet I have looked at this claim by the light of history and my

own conscience, and it seems to me so looked at to be a

most just claim, and that resistance to it means nothing

short of a denial of the hope of civilization.

This then is the claim:

It is right and necessary that all men should have work to

do which shall he worth doing, and be of itself pleasant to

do; and which should he done under such conditions as

would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious.

Turn that claim about as I may, think of it as long as I can, I

cannot find that it is an exorbitant claim; yet again I say if

Society would or could admit it, the face of the world would

be changed; discontent and strife and dishonesty would be

ended. To feel that we were doing work useful to others and

pleasant to ourselves, and that such work and its due

reward could not fail us! What serious harm could happen to

us then? And the price to be paid for so making the world

happy is Revolution: Socialism instead of laissez-faire.

How can we of the middle classes help to bring such a state

of things about; a state of things as nearly as possible the

reverse of the present state of things?

The reverse; no less than that. For first, The work must be

worth doing: think what a change that would make in the

world! I tell you I feel dazed at the thought of the immensity

of work which is undergone for the making of useless things.

It would be an instructive day's work for any one of us who

is strong enough to walk through two or three of the

principal streets of London on a week-day, and take

accurate note of everything in the shop windows which is

embarrassing or superfluous to the daily life of a serious

man. Nay, the most of these things no one, serious or

unserious, wants at all; only a foolish habit makes even the

lightest-minded of us suppose that he wants them, and to

many people even of those who buy them they are obvious

encumbrances to real work, thought and pleasure. But I beg

you to think of the enormous mass of men who are occupied

with this miserable trumpery, from the engineers who have

had to make the machines for making them, down to the

hapless clerks who sit day-long year after year in the

horrible dens wherein the wholesale exchange of them is

transacted, and the shopmen, who not daring to call their

souls their own, retail them amidst numberless insults which

they must not resent, to the idle public which doesn't want

them but buys them to be bored by them and sick to death

of them.

I am talking of the merely useless things; but there are

other matters not merely useless, but actively destructive

and poisonous which command a good price in the market;

for instance, adulterated food and drink. Vast is the number

of slaves whom competitive Commerce employs in turning

out infamies such as these. But quite apart from them there

is an enormous mass of labour which is just merely wasted;

many thousands of men and women making nothing with

terrible and inhuman toil which deadens the soul and

shortens mere animal life itself.

All these are the slaves of what is called luxury, which in the

modern sense of the word comprises a mass of sham

wealth, the invention of competitive Commerce, and

enslaves not only the poor people who are compelled to

work at its production, but also the foolish and not

overhappy people who buy it to harass themselves with its

encumbrance.

Now if we are to have popular Art, or indeed Art of any kind,

we must at once and for all be done with this luxury; it is

the supplanter, the changeling of Art; so much so that by

those who know of nothing better it has even been taken for

Art, the divine solace of human labour, the romance of each

day's hard practice of the difficult art of living.

But I say Art cannot live beside it, nor self-respect in any

class of life. Effeminacy and brutality are its companions on

the right hand and the left. This, first of all, we of the well-

to-do classes must get rid of if we are serious in desiring the

new birth of Art: and if not then corruption is digging a

terrible pit of perdition for society, from which indeed the

new birth may come, but surely from amidst of terror,

violence and misery.

Indeed if it were but ridding ourselves, the well-to-do

people, of this mountain of rubbish that would be something

worth doing: things which everybody knows are of no use;

the very capitalists know well that there is no genuine

healthy demand for them, and they are compelled to foist

them off on the public by stirring up a strange feverish

desire for petty excitement, the outward token of which is

known by the conventional name of fashion—a strange

monster born of the vacancy of the lives of rich people, and

the eagerness of competitive Commerce to make the most

of the huge crowd of workmen whom it breeds as

unregarded instruments for what is called the making of

money.

Do not think it a little matter to resist this monster of folly;

to think for yourselves what you yourselves really desire,

will not only make men and women of you so far, but may

also set you thinking of the due desires of other people,

since you will soon find when you get to know a work of Art,

that slavish work is undesirable.

And here furthermore is at least a little sign whereby to

distinguish between a rag of fashion and a work of Art:

whereas the toys of fashion when the first gloss is worn off

them do become obviously worthless even to the frivolous—

a work of Art, be it ever so humble, is long lived; we never

tire of it; as long as a scrap hangs together it is valuable

and instructive to each new generation. All works of Art in

short have the property of becoming venerable amidst

decay: and reason good, for from the first there was a soul

in them, the thought of man, which will be visible in them so

long as the body exists in which they were implanted.

And that last sentence brings me to considering the other

side of the necessity for labour only occupying itself in

making goods that are worth making. Hitherto we have

been thinking of it only from the user's point of view; even

so looked at it was surely important enough; yet from the

other side—as to the producer—it is far more important still.

For I say again that in buying these things

'Tis the lives of men you buy!

Will you from mere folly and thoughtlessness make

yourselves partakers of the guilt of those who compel their

fellow men to labour uselessly?

For when I said it was necessary for all things made to be

worth making, I set up that claim chiefly on behalf

of Labour; since the waste of making useless things grieves

the workman doubly. As part of the public he is forced into

buying them, and the more part of his miserable wages are

squeezed out of him by an universal kind of truck system;

as one of the producers he is forced into making them, and

so into losing the very foundations of that pleasure in daily

work which I claim as his birthright; he is compelled to

labour joylessly at making the poison which the truck

system compels him to buy. So that the huge mass of men

who are compelled by folly and greed to make harmful and

useless things are sacrificed to Society. I say that this would

be terrible and unendurable even though they were

sacrificed to the good of Society—if that were possible; but

if they are sacrificed not for the welfare of Society but for its

whims, to add to its degradation, what do luxury and

fashion look like then? On one side ruinous and wearisome

waste leading through corruption to corruption on to

complete cynicism at last, and the disintegration of all

Society; and on the other side—implacable oppression

destructive of all pleasure and hope in life, and leading—

whitherward?

Here then is one thing for us of the middle classes to do

before we can clear the ground for the new birth of Art,

before we can clear our own consciences of the guilt of

enslaving men by their labour. One thing; and if we could do

it perhaps that one thing would be enough, and all other

healthy changes would follow it; but can we do it? Can we

escape from the corruption of Society which threatens us?

Can the middle classes regenerate themselves?

At first sight one would say that a body of people so

powerful, who have built up the gigantic edifice of modern

Commerce, whose science, invention and energy have

subdued the forces of nature to serve their every-day

purposes, and who guide the organization that keeps these

natural powers in subjection in a way almost miraculous; at

first sight one would say surely such a mighty mass of

wealthy men could do anything they please.

And yet I doubt it: their own creation, the Commerce they

are so proud of, has become their master; and all we of the

well-to-do classes—some of us with triumphant glee, some

with dull satisfaction, and some with sadness of heart—are

compelled to admit not that Commerce was made for man,

but that man was made for Commerce.

On all sides we are forced to admit it. There are of the

English middle class to-day, for instance, men of the highest

aspirations towards Art, and of the strongest will; men who

are most deeply convinced of the necessity to civilization of

surrounding men's lives with beauty; and many lesser men,

thousands for what I know, refined and cultivated, follow

them and praise their opinions: but both the leaders and the
led are incapable of saving so much as half a dozen

commons from the grasp of inexorable Commerce: they are

as helpless in spite of their culture and their genius as if

they were just so many overworked shoemakers: less lucky

than King Midas, our green fields and clear waters, nay the

very air we breathe are turned not to gold (which might

please some of us for an hour may be) but to dirt; and to

speak plainly we know full well that under the present

gospel of Capital not only there is no hope of bettering it,

hut that things grow worse year by year, day by day. Let us

eat and drink, for to-morrow we die—choked by filth.

Or let me give you a direct example of the slavery to

competitive Commerce, in which we hapless folk of the

middle classes live. I have exhorted you to the putting away

of luxury, to the stripping yourselves of useless

encumbrances, to the simplification of life, and I believe that

there are not a few of you that heartily agree with me on

that point. Well, I have long thought that one of the most

revolting circumstances that cling to our present class-

system, is the relation between us, of the well-to-do, and

our domestic servants: we and our servants live together

under one roof, but are little better than strangers to each

other, in spite of the good nature and good feeling that

often exists on both sides: nay strangers is a mild word;

though we are of the same blood, bound by the same laws,

we live together like people of different tribes. Now think

how this works on the job of getting through the ordinary

day's work of a household, and whether our lives can be

simplified while such a system lasts. To go no further, you

who are housekeepers know full well (as I myself do, since I

have learned the useful art of cooking a dinner) how it

would simplify the day's work, if the chief meals could be

eaten in common; if there had not got to be double meals,

one upstairs, another down stairs. And again, surely we of

this educational century, cannot be ignorant of what an

education it would be for the less refined members of a

household to meet on common easy terms the more refined

once a day, at least; to note the elegant manners of well-

bred ladies, to give and take in talk with learned and

travelled men, with men of action and imagination: believe

me that would beat elementary education.

Furthermore this matter cleaves close to our subject of Art:

for note, as a token of this stupidity of our sham civilization,

what foolish rabbit warrens our well-to-do houses are

obliged to be; instead of being planned in the rational

ancient way which was used from the time of Homer to past
the time of Chaucer, a big hall, to wit, with a few chambers

tacked on to it for sleeping or sulking in. No wonder our

houses are cramped and ignoble when the lives lived in

them are cramped and ignoble also.

Well, and why don't we who have thought of this, as I am

sure many of us have, change this mean and shabby

custom, simplifying our lives thereby and educating

our friends, to whose toil we owe so many comforts? Why

do not you—and I—set about doing this to-morrow?

Because we cannot; because our servants wouldn't have it,

knowing, as we know, that both parties would be made

miserable by it.

The civilization of the nineteenth century forbids us to share

the refinement of a household among its members!

So you see, if we middle-class people belong to a powerful

folk, and in good sooth we do, we are but playing a part

played in many a tale of the world's history: we are great

but hapless; we are important dignified people, but bored to

death; we have bought our power at price of our liberty and

our pleasure.

So I say in answer to the question Can we put luxury from

us and live simple and decent lives? Yes, when we are free

from the slavery of Capitalist Commerce; but not before.

Surely there are some of you who long to be free; who have

been educated and refined, and had your perceptions of

beauty and order quickened only that they might be

shocked and wounded at every turn, by the brutalities of

competitive Commerce; who have been so hunted and

driven by it that, though you are well-to-do, rich even may

be, you have now nothing to lose from social revolution:

love of Art, that is to say of the true pleasure of life, has

brought you to this, that you must throw in your lot with

that of the wage-slave of competitive Commerce; you and

he must help each other and have one hope in common, or

you at any rate will live and die hopeless and unhelped. You

who long to be set free from the oppression of the money

grubbers, hope for the day when you will becompelled to be

free!

Meanwhile if otherwise that oppression has left scarce any

work to do worth doing, one thing at least is left us to strive

for, the raising of the standard of life where it is lowest,

where it is low: that will put a spoke in the wheel of the

triumphant car of competitive Commerce.

Nor can I conceive of anything more likely to raise the

standard of life than the convincing some thousands of

those who live by labour, of the necessity of their supporting

the second part of the claim I have made for Labour;

namely That their work should be of itself pleasant to do. If

we could but convince them that such a strange revolution

in Labour as this would be of infinite benefit not to them

only, but to all men; and that it is so right and natural that

for the reverse to be the case, that most men's work should

be grievous to them, is a mere monstrosity of these latter

days, which must in the long run bring ruin and confusion

on the Society that allows it—If we could but convince them,

then indeed there would be chance of the phrase Art of the

People being something more than a mere word.

At first sight, indeed, it would seem impossible to make men

born under the present system of Commerce understand

that labour may be a blessing to them: not in the sense in

which the phrase is sometimes preached to them by those

whose labour is light and easily evaded: not as a necessary

task laid by nature on the poor for the benefit of the rich;

not as an opiate to dull their sense of right and wrong, to

make them sit down quietly under their burdens to the end

of time, blessing the squire and his relations: all this they

could understand our saying to them easily enough, and

sometimes would listen to it I fear with at least a show of

complacency—if they thought there were anything to be

made out of us thereby. But the true doctrine that labour

should be a real tangible blessing in itself to the working

man, a pleasure even as sleep and strong drink are to him

now: this one might think it hard indeed for him to

understand, so different as it is to anything which he has

found labour to be.

Nevertheless though most men's work is only borne as a

necessary evil like sickness, my experience as far as it goes

is, that whether it be from a certain sacredness in

handiwork which does cleave to it even under the worst

circumstances, or whether it be that the poor man who is

driven by necessity to deal with things which are terribly

real, when he thinks at all on such matters, thinks less

conventionally than the rich; whatever it may be, my

experience so far is that the working man finds it easier to

understand the doctrine of the claim of Labour to pleasure in

the work itself than the rich or well-to-do man does. Apart

from any trivial words of my own, I have been surprised to

find, for instance, such a hearty feeling toward John Ruskin

among working-class audiences: they can see the prophet in

him rather than the fantastic rhetorician, as more superfine

audiences do.

That is a good omen, I think, for the education of times to

come. But we who somehow are so tainted by cynicism,

because of our helplessness in the ugly world which

surrounds and presses on us, cannot we somehow raise our

own hopes at least to the point of thinking that what hope

glimmers on the millions of the slaves of Commerce is

something better than a mere delusion, the false dawn of a

cloudy midnight with which 'tis only the moon that

struggles? Let us call to mind that there yet remain

monuments in the world which show us that all human

labour was not always a grief and a burden to men. Let us

think of the mighty and lovely architecture, for instance, of

medi?val Europe: of the buildings raised before Commerce

had put the coping stone on the edifice of tyranny by the

discovery that fancy, imagination, sentiment, the joy of

creation and the hope of fair fame are marketable articles

too precious to be allowed to men who have not the money

to buy them, to mere handicraftsmen and day labourers. Let

us remember there was a time when men had pleasure in

their daily work, but yet as to other matters hoped for light

and freedom even as they do now: their dim hope grew

brighter, and they watched its seeming fulfilment drawing

nearer and nearer, and gazed so eagerly on it that they did

not note how the ever watchful foe, oppression, had

changed his shape and was stealing from them what they

had already gained in the days when the light of their new

hope was but a feeble glimmer; so they lost the old gain,

and for lack of it the new gain was changed and spoiled for

them into something not much better than loss.

Betwixt the days in which we now live and the end of the

Middle Ages, Europe has gained freedom of thought,

increase of knowledge, and huge talent for dealing with the

material forces of nature; comparative political freedom

withal and respect for the lives of civilizedmen, and other

gains that go with these things: nevertheless I say

deliberately that if the present state of Society is to endure,

she has bought these gains at too high a price in the loss of

the pleasure in daily work which once did certainly solace

the mass of men for their fears and oppressions: the death

of Art was too high a price to pay for the material prosperity

of the middle classes.

Grievous indeed it was, that we could not keep both our

hands full, that we were forced to spill from one while we

gathered with the other: yet to my mind it is more grievous

still to be unconscious of the loss; or being dimly conscious

of it to have to force ourselves to forget it and to cry out

that all is well.

For, though all is not well, I know that men's natures are

not so changed in three centuries that we can say to all the

thousands of years which went before them; You were

wrong to cherish Art, and now we have found out that all

men need is food and raiment and shelter, with a smattering

of knowledge of the material fashion of the universe.

Creation is no longer a need of man's soul, his right hand

may forget its cunning, and he be none the worse for it.

Three hundred years, a day in the lapse of ages, has not

changed man's nature thus utterly, be sure of that: one day

we shall win back Art, that is to say the pleasure of life; win

back Art again to our daily labour. Where is the hope then,

you may say; Show it us.

There lies the hope, where hope of old deceived us. We

gave up Art for what we thought was light and freedom, but

it was less than light and freedom which we bought: the

light showed many things to those of the well-to-do who

cared to look for them: the freedom left the well-to-do free

enough if they cared to use their freedom; but these were

few at the best: to the most of men the light showed them

that they need look for hope no more, and the freedom left

the most of men free—to take at a wretched wage what

slave's work lay nearest to them or starve.

There is our hope, I say. If the bargain had been really fair,

complete all round, then were there nought else to do but to

bury Art, and forget the beauty of life: but now the cause of

Art has something else to appeal to: no less than the hope

of the people for the happy life which has not yet been

granted to them. There is our hope: the cause of Art is the

cause of the people.

Think of a piece of history, and so hope! Time was when the

rule of Rome held the whole world of civilization in its

poisonous embrace. To all men—even the best, as you may

see in the very gospels—that rule seemed doomed to last

for ever: nor to those who dwelt under it was there any

world worth thinking of beyond it: but the days passed and

though none saw a shadow of the coming change, it came

none the less, like a thief in the night, and the Barbarians,

the world which lay outside the rule of Rome, were upon

her; and men blind with terror lamented the change and

deemed the world undone by the Fury of the North. But

even that fury bore with it things long strange to Rome,

which once had been the food its glory fed on: hatred of

lies, scorn of riches, contempt of death, faith in the fair

fame won by steadfast endurance, honourable love of

women—all these things the Northern Fury bore with it, as

the mountain torrent bears the gold; and so Rome fell and

Europe rose, and the hope of the world was born again.

To those that have hearts to understand, this tale of the

past is a parable of the days to come; of the change in store

for us hidden in the breast of the Barbarism of civilization—

the Proletariat; and we of the middle class, the strength of

the mighty but monstrous system of competitive Commerce,

it behoves us to clear our souls of greed and cowardice and

to face the change which is now once more on the road; to

see the good and the hope it bears with it amidst all its

threats of violence, amidst all its ugliness, which was not

born of itself but of that which it is doomed to destroy.

Now once more I will say that we well-to-do people, those of

us who love Art, not as a toy, but as a thing necessary to

the life of man, as a token of his freedom and happiness,

have for our best work the raising of the standard of life

among the people; or in other words establishing the claim I

made for Labour-which I will now put in a different form,

that we may try to see what chiefly hinders us from making

that claim good and what are the enemies to be attacked.

Thus I put the claim again:

Nothing should be made by man's labour which is not worth

making; or which must be made by labour degrading to the

makers.

Simple as that proposition is, and obviously right as I am

sure it must seem to you, you will find, when you come to

consider the matter, that it is a direct challenge to the death

to the present system of labour in civilized countries. That

system, which I have called competitive Commerce, is

distinctly a system of war; that is of waste and destruction:

or you may call it gambling if you will, the point of it being

that under it whatever a man gains he gains at the expense

of some other man's loss. Such a system does not and

cannot heed whether the matters it makes are worth

making; it does not and cannot heed whether those who

make them are degraded by their work: it heeds one thing

and only one, namely, what it calls making a profit; which

word has got to be used so conventionally that I must

explain to you what it really means, to wit the plunder of the

weak by the strong! Now I say of this system, that it I is of

its very nature destructive of Art, that is to say of the

happiness of life. Whatever consideration is shown for the

life of the people in these days, whatever is done which is

worth doing, is done in spite of the system and in the teeth

of its maxims; and most true it is that we do, all of us,

tacitly at least, admit that it is opposed to all the highest

aspirations of mankind.

Do we not know, for instance, how those men of genius

work who are the salt of the earth, without whom the

corruption of society would long ago have become

unendurable? The poet, the artist, the man of science, is it

not true that in their fresh and glorious days, when they are

in the heyday of their faith and enthusiasm, they are

thwarted at every turn by Commercial war, with its sneering

question "Will it pay?" Is it not true that when they begin to

win worldly success, when they become comparatively rich,

in spite of ourselves they seem to us tainted by the contact

with the commercial world?

Need I speak of great schemes that hang about neglected;

of things most necessary to be done, and so confessed by

all men, that no one can seriously set a hand to because of

the lack of money; while if it be a question of creating or

stimulating some foolish whim in the public mind, the

satisfaction of which will breed a profit, the money will come

in by the ton. Nay, you know what an old story it is of the

wars bred by Commerce in search of new markets, which

not even the most peaceable of statesmen can resist; an old

story and still it seems for ever new, and now become a

kind of grim joke, at which I would rather not laugh if I

could help it, but am even forced to laugh from a soul laden

with anger.

And all that mastery over the powers of nature which the

last hundred years or less has given us: what has it done for

us under this system? In the opinion of John Stuart Mill, it

was doubtful if all the mechanical inventions of modern

times have done anything to lighten the toil of labour: be

sure there is no doubt, that they were not made for that

end, but to "make a profit." Those almost miraculous

machines, which if orderly forethought had dealt with them

might even now be speedily extinguishing all irksome and

unintelligent labour, leaving us free to raise the standard of

skill of hand and energy of mind in our workmen, and to

produce afresh that loveliness and order which only the

hand of man guided by his soul can produce—what have

they done for us now? Those machines of which the civilized

world is so proud, has it any right to be proud of the use

they have been put to by Commercial war and waste?

I do not think exultation can have a place here: Commercial

war has made a profit of these wonders; that is to say it has

by their means bred for itself millions of unhappy workers,

unintelligent machines as far as their daily work goes, order

to get cheap labour, to keep up its exciting but deadly game

for ever. Indeed that labour would have been cheap enough

—cheap to the Commercial war generals, and deadly dear to

the rest of us—but for the seeds of freedom which valiant

men of old have sowed amongst us to spring up in our own

day into Chartism and Trades Unionism and Socialism, for

the defence of order and a decent life. Terrible would have

been our slavery, and not of the working classes alone, but

for these germs of the change which must be.

Even as it is, by the reckless aggregation of machine-

workers and their adjoints in the great cities and the

manufacturing districts, it has kept down life amongst us,

and keeps it down to a miserably low standard; so low that

any standpoint for improvement is hard to think of even. By

the means of speedy communication which it has created,

and which should have raised the standard of life by

spreading intelligence from town to country, and widely

creating modest centres of freedom of thought and habits of

culture—by the means of the railways and the like it has

gathered to itself fresh recruits for the reserve army of

competing lack-ails on which its gambling gains so much

depend, stripping the country-side of its population, and

extinguishing all reasonable hope and life in the lesser

towns.
Nor can I, an artist, think last or least of the outward effects

which betoken this rule of the wretched anarchy of

Commercial war. Think of the spreading sore of London

swallowing up with its loathsomeness field and wood and

heath without mercy and without hope, mocking our feeble

efforts to deal even with its minor evils of smokeladen sky

and befouled river: the black horror and reckless squalor of

our manufacturing districts, so dreadful to the senses which

are unused to them that it is ominous for the future of the

race that any man can live among it in tolerable

cheerfulness: nay in the open country itself the thrusting

aside by miserable jerry-built brick and slate of the solid

grey dwellings that are still scattered about, fit emblems in

their cheery but beautiful simplicity of the yeomen of the

English field, whose destruction at the hands of yet young

Commercial war was lamented so touchingly by the high-

minded More and the valiant Latimer. Everywhere in short

the change from old to new involving one certainty,

whatever else may be doubtful, a worsening of the aspect of

the country.

This is the condition of England: of England the country of

order, peace and stability, the land of common sense and

practicality; the country to which all eyes are turned of

those whose hope is for the continuance and perfection of

modern progress. There are countries in Europe whose

aspect is not so ruined outwardly, though they may have

less of material prosperity, less wide-spread middle-class

wealth to balance the squalor and disgrace I have

mentioned: but if they are members of the great

Commercial whole, through the same mill they have got to

go, unless something should happen to turn aside the

triumphant march of War Commercial before it reaches the

end.

That is what three centuries of Commerce have brought that

hope to which sprung up when feudalism began to fall to

pieces. What can give us the day-spring of a new hope?

What, save general revolt against the tyranny of

Commercial war? The palliatives over which many worthy

people are busying themselves now are useless: because

they are but unorganized partial revolts against a vast wide-

spreading grasping organization which will, with the

unconscious instinct of a plant, meet every attempt at

bettering the condition of the people with an attack on a

fresh side; new machines, new markets, wholesale

emigration, the revival of grovelling superstitions,

preachments of thrift to lack-alls, of temperance to the

wretched; such things as these will baffle at every turn all

partial revolts against the monster we of the middle classes

have created for our own undoing.

I will speak quite plainly on this matter, though I must say

an ugly word in the end if I am to say what I think. The one

thing to be done is to set people far and wide to think it

possible to raise the standard of life. If you think of it, you

will see clearly that this means stirring up general

discontent.

And now to illustrate that I turn back to my blended claim

for Art and Labour, that I may deal with the third clause in

it: here is the claim again:—

It is right and necessary that all men should have work to

do—

First—Work worth doing;

Second—Work of itself pleasant to do;

Third—Work done under such conditions as would make it

neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious.

With the first and second clauses, which are very nearly

related to each other, I have tried to deal already. They are

as it were the soul of the claim for proper labour; the third

clause is the body without which that soul cannot exist. I

will extend it in this way, which will indeed partly carry us

over ground already covered:

No one who is willing to work should ever fear want of such

employment as would earn for him all due necessaries of

mind and body.

All due necessaries—what are the due necessaries for a

good citizen?

First, honourable and fitting work: which would involve

giving him a chance of gaining capacity for his work by due

education; also, as the work must be worth doing and

pleasant to do, it will be found necessary to this end that his

position be so assured to him that he cannot be compelled

to do useless work, or work in which he cannot take

pleasure.

The second necessity is decency of

surroundings: including (a) good lodging; (b) ample

space; (c) general order and beauty. That is (a) our houses

must be well built, clean and healthy; (b) there must be

abundant garden space in our towns, and our towns must

not eat up the fields and natural features of the country;

nay I demand even that there be left waste places and wilds

in it, or romance and poetry—that is Art—will die out

amongst us. (c) Order and beauty means, that not only our

houses must be stoutly and properly built, but also that they
be ornamented duly: that the fields be not only left for

cultivation, but also that they be not spoilt by it any more

than a garden is spoilt: no one for instance to be allowed to

cut down, for mere profit, trees whose loss would spoil a

landscape: neither on any pretext should people be allowed

to darken the daylight with smoke, to befoul rivers, or to

degrade any spot of earth with squalid litter and brutal

wasteful disorder.

The third necessity is leisure. You will understand that in

using that word limply first that all men must work for some

portion of the day, and secondly that they have a positive

right to claim a respite from that work: the leisure they

have a right to claim, must be ample enough to allow them

full rest of mind and body; a man must have time for

serious individual thought, for imagination—for dreaming

even—or the race of men will inevitably worsen. Even of the

honourable and fitting work of which I have been speaking,

which is a whole heaven asunder from the forced work of

the Capitalist system, a man must not be asked to give

more than his fair share; or men will become unequally

developed, and there will still be a rotten place in Society.

Here then I have given you the conditions under which work

worth doing, and undegrading to do, can be done: under no

other conditions can it be done: if the general work of the

world is not worth doing and undegrading to do it is a

mockery to talk of civilization.

Well then can these conditions be obtained under the

present gospel of Capital, which has for its motto "The devil

take the hindmost"?

Let us look at our claim again in other words:

In a properly ordered state of Society every man willing to

work should be ensured—

First—Honourable and fitting work;

Second—A healthy and beautiful house;

Third—Full leisure for rest of mind and body.

Now I don't suppose that anybody here will deny that it

would be desirable that this claim should be satisfied: but

what I want you all to think is that it is necessary that it be

satisfied; that unless we try our utmost to satisfy it, we are

but part and parcel of a society founded on robbery and

injustice, condemned by the laws of the universe to destroy

itself by its own efforts to exist for ever. Furthermore, I

want you to think that as on the one hand it is possible to

satisfy this claim, so on the other hand it is impossible to

satisfy it under the present plutocratic system, which will

forbid us even any serious attempt to satisfy it: the

beginnings of Social Revolution must he the foundations of

the re-building of the Art of the People, that is to say of the

Pleasure of Life.

To say ugly words again. Do we not know that the greater

part of men in civilized societies are dirty, ignorant, brutal—

or at best, anxious about the next week's subsistence—that

they are in short poor? And we know, when we think of it,

that this is unfair.

It is an old story of men who have become rich by dishonest

and tyrannical means, spending in terror of the future their

ill-gotten gains liberally and in charity as 'tis called: nor are

such people praised; in the old tales 'tis thought that the

devil gets them after all. An old story—but I say "De te

fabula"—of thee is the story told: thou art the man!

I say that we of the rich and well-to-do classes are daily

doing it likewise: unconsciously, or half consciously it may

be, we gather wealth by trading on the hard necessity of our

fellows, and then we give driblets of it away to those of

them who in one way or other cry out loudest to us. Our

poor laws, our hospitals, our charities, organized and

unorganized, are but tubs thrown to the whale; blackmail

paid to lame-foot justice, that she may not hobble after us

too fast.
When will the time come when honest and clear-seeing men

will grow sick of all this chaos of waste, this robbing of Peter

to pay Paul, which is the essence of Commercial war? When

shall we band together to replace the system whose motto

is "The devil take the hindmost" with a system whose motto

shall be really and without qualification "One for all and all

for one."

Who knows but the time may be at hand, but that we now

living may see the beginning of that end which shall

extinguish luxury and poverty? when the upper, middle, and

lower classes shall have melted into one class, living

contentedly a simple and happy life.

That is a long sentence to describe the state of things which

I am asking you to help to bring about: the abolition of

slavery is a shorter one and means the same thing. You may

be tempted to think the end not worth striving for on one

hand; or on the other to suppose, each one of you, that it is

so far ahead, that nothing serious can be done towards it in

our own time, and that you may as well therefore sit quiet

and do nothing: let me remind you how only the other day

in the lifetime of the youngest of us many thousand men of

our own kindred gave their 'lives on the battle-field to bring

to a happy ending a mere episode in the struggle for the

abolition of slavery: they are blessed and happy, for the

opportunity came to them, and they seized it and did their

best, and the world is the wealthier for it; and if such an

opportunity is offered to us shall we thrust it from us that

we may sit still in ease of body, in doubt, in disease of soul?

These are the days of combat: who can doubt that as he

hears all round him the sounds that betoken discontent and

hope and fear in high and low, the sounds of awakening

courage and awakening conscience? These, I say, are the

days of combat, when there is no external peace possible to

an honest man; but when for that very reason the internal

peace of a good conscience founded on settled convictions is

the easier to win, since action for the cause is offered us.

Or, will you say that here in this quiet, constitutionally

governed country of England there is no opportunity for

action offered to us: if we were in gagged Germany, in

gagged Austria, in Russia where a word or two might land

us in Siberia or the prison or fortress of Peter and Paul—

why then, indeed—

Ah! my friends, it is but a poor tribute to offer on the tombs

of the martyrs of liberty, this refusal to take the torch from

their dying hands! Is it not of Goethe it is told, that on

hearing one say he was going to America to begin life again,

he replied, "Here is America, or nowhere!" So for my part I

say, "Here is Russia, or nowhere."

To say the governing classes in England are not afraid of

freedom of speech, thereforelet us abstain from speaking

freely, is a strange paradox to me. Let us on the contrary

press in through the breach which valiant men have made

for us: if we hang back we make their labours, their

sufferings, their deaths of no account.

Believe me we shall be shown that it is all or nothing: or will

anyone here tell me that a Russian moujik is in a worse case

than a sweating tailor's wage-slave? Do not let us deceive

ourselves, the class of victims exists here as in Russia.

There are fewer of them? May be—then are they of

themselves more helpless, and so have more need of our

help.

And how can we of the middle classes, we the capitalists

and our hangers-on, help them? By renouncing our class,

and on all occasions when antagonism rises up between the

classes casting in our lot with the victims: with those who

are condemned at the best to lack of education, refinement,

leisure, pleasure and renown; and at the worst to a life

lower than that of the most brutal of savages—in order that

the system of competitive Commerce may endure.

There is no other way: and this way I tell you plainly, will in

the long run give us plentiful occasion for self-sacrifice

without going to Russia. I feel sure that in this assembly

there are some who are steeped in discontent with the

miserable anarchy of the century of Commerce: to them I

offer a means of renouncing their class by supporting a

Socialist propaganda in joining the Democratic Federation,

which I have the honour of representing before you, and

which I believe is the only body in this country which puts

forward constructive Socialism as its program.

This to my mind is opportunity enough for those of us who

are discontented with the present state of things and long

for an opportunity of renunciation; and it is very certain that

in accepting the opportunity you will have at once to

undergo some of the inconveniences of martyrdom, though

without gaining its dignity at present. You will at least be

mocked and laughed at by those whose mockery is a token

of honour to an honest man; but you will, I don't doubt it,

be looked on coldly by many excellent people, not all of

whom will be quite stupid. You will run the risk of losing

position, reputation, money, friends even: losses which are

certainly pin pricks to the serious martyrdom I have spoken

of; but which none the less do try the stuff a man is made of
—all the more as he can escape them with little other

reproach of cowardice than that which his own conscience

cries out at him.

Nor can I assure you that you will for ever escape scot-free

from the attacks of open tyranny. It is true that at present

Capitalist Society only looks on Socialism in England with

dry grins. But remember that the body of people who have

for instance ruined India, starved and gagged Ireland, and

tortured Egypt, have capacities in them—some ominous

signs of which they have lately shown — for openly playing

the tyrants' game nearer home.

So on all sides I can offer you a position which involves

sacrifice; a position which will give you your "America" at

home, and make you inwardly sure that you are at least of

some use to the cause: and I earnestly beg you, those of

you who are convinced of the justice of our cause, not to

hang back from active participation in a struggle which—

who ever helps or who ever abstains from helping—must

beyond all doubt end at last in Victory!

The reference to this piece of work in the Chronology

Introduction to Art and Socialism

The William Morris Internet Archive : Works